The Great American Novel: Writing National Identity

This thesis examines the tradition of the Great American Novel (GAN). Against current academic trends, this literary canon is not understood to safeguard conservative hegemonies. Here, it is rather studied as an ongoing discourse that has questioned ostensible certainties in American national identity throughout the twentieth century. A select number of GANs are shown to have survived in the canon for decades, and to share an even more select number of archetypes which the novels consistently problematise. The continued resonance of these narratives is argued to be indicative of inherent ambiguities that fester on in American identity as cultural unfinished business. An added relevance is the fact that those uncertainties cropped up precisely during periods when US nationalism seemed to peak, a pattern that forms a surprising, alternative cultural history. The term “Great American Novel” was coined in 1868 by John William DeForest, who called for realist American novels to equal...Show moreThis thesis examines the tradition of the Great American Novel (GAN). Against current academic trends, this literary canon is not understood to safeguard conservative hegemonies. Here, it is rather studied as an ongoing discourse that has questioned ostensible certainties in American national identity throughout the twentieth century. A select number of GANs are shown to have survived in the canon for decades, and to share an even more select number of archetypes which the novels consistently problematise. The continued resonance of these narratives is argued to be indicative of inherent ambiguities that fester on in American identity as cultural unfinished business. An added relevance is the fact that those uncertainties cropped up precisely during periods when US nationalism seemed to peak, a pattern that forms a surprising, alternative cultural history. The term “Great American Novel” was coined in 1868 by John William DeForest, who called for realist American novels to equal European ones, and to present an imagined US community that overcame post-Civil War regional divisions. Ever since, the tradition has been alluring to American authors seeking to establish their cultural weight. Yet the canon as we know it today only took shape after the confidence-boosting outcome of the First World War, when critics and academics renounced the European, realist ideals of their predecessors in favour of “Romance”, a symbolical style which they claimed had always been the basis of literary American exceptionalism. Retroactively, The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn were canonised as the Romance-edifice, as if they had always been just that. Their archetypes, namely individualism, the American Dream and the frontier spirit, together became a national mythology of sorts, so successful was this invented tradition. Soon it was so familiar, that subsequent authors who sought to reflect on American identity could do so by alluding to those three ultimate GANs. The canon thus became an ongoing discourse, a cultural conversation in which a limited set of rules and clichés were contemplated as national roots. Authors from the Great Depression were the first to demonstrate this. They took the three tropes mentioned, and superimposed them onto topical stories of economic hardship. GANs from the era thus romanticised the canonical archetypes as the eternal foundations of American exceptionalism, precisely by linking their betrayal to contemporary, “un-American” injustices. The years following the Second World War, by contrast, saw such a boost to national confidence that they were named a “Golden Age.” Yet a new generation of authors showed its teeth by digging up GAN-archetypes and weaponizing them, especially those related to frontier-adventurism, against contemporary ideals of dull material comfort. Indeed, the canon’s role as underminer of cultural certainties became fixed in these years. Hence the nadir in GAN-output amid the blows to American superiority of the 1960s and 1970s: the eras of Vietnam and Watergate required no reminding of American problems. The Reaganist 1980s did, however. Especially black authors began to attack Americans’ sense of innocence regarding their history, by again returning to the GANs’ archetypes: taken as the roots of US exceptionalism, they were rewritten as shared traumas. Far from weakening the canon’s position, this attack on its traditions actually revitalised its function as ongoing discourse. Consequently, the 1990s saw more (critically acclaimed) GAN-attempts than any other decade. Within them, authors indicated how the end of the Cold War not only boosted American exceptionalism, but also left it without a signifying Other, and thus without direction and narrative. Again, cultural confidence in the wake of a victory in a major global conflict was being undermined by GANs’ exposing hidden ambivalences in national mythology. The GAN’s imagined community has always destabilised American certainties. The canon forms a surprising, alternative cultural history, in which anxieties invisible in other histories come to the fore, precisely when one would least expect them to. Understanding canons as mere conservative bastions is thus argued to be highly reductive, and damaging to their rich analytical promise in cultural analysis. NB: Dubbelscriptie t.b.v. de opleidingen MA Literary Studies en MA GeschiedenisShow less

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The Great American Novel: Writing National Identity